[NBLUG/talk] dselect strangeness

[Andrew]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:53:09 -0700
E Frank Ball <frankb at efball.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 03:51:10PM -0700, Andrew wrote:
> } On one of my boxes, I'm tracking (or at least *trying* to track)
> } Debian's Testing branch. When I went to update using dselect
> } today, it told me that it wanted to remove gnome-applets,
> } gnome-core, gnome-help, gnome-panel, and gnome-panel-data. I
> } hadn't asked for these or any other packages to be removed and
> } dselect didn't show any conflicts related to these packages, so
> } I'm wondering why dselect wants to remove them.
> } 
> } Is anyone else tracking Debian Testing and has this happened to
> } you? Could this be related to Gnome2? Has it arrived in Testing,
> } yet? Unfortunately, dselect isn't giving me the names of the 46
> } packages that it does want to upgrade, so I can't see if any of
> } them are Gnome-related.
> 
> How about using:
> apt-get --show-upgraded upgrade
> 
> That should show the names of the 46 other packages it wants to upgrade.


Well, I thought of that (actually, I use -u instead of
--show-upgraded - less typing), but APT and dselect use different
methods of choosing what stays and what goes:


lhasa:~# apt-get -u upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back
  aspell aspell-en aspell-es gnome-panel gnome-panel-data gnome-session gs-esp
  libcupsys2 liborbit2 libreadline4 xprt-common 
The following packages will be upgraded
  aalib1 blt blt-common cdda2wav cdlabelgen cdrecord coreutils cron
  dictionaries-common doc-linux-text fdutils fileutils gzip lftp libfreetype6
  libgimpprint1 libglib2.0-0 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnutls5 libgtk1.2
  libgtk1.2-common liblinc1 liblockfile1 libltdl3 liblzo1 libpcap0.7
  libpng10-0 libpng12-0 libpng2 libpng3 libxml2 mkisofs netbase pppconfig
  procps shellutils syslinux tcl8.4 textutils tk8.4 whois zlib1g 
43 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11  not upgraded.
Need to get 20.5MB of archives. After unpacking 6883kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
lhasa:~#


Output from the Install command in dselect:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-applets gnome-core gnome-help gnome-panel gnome-panel-data 
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libcupsimage2 libpanel-applet2-0 
46 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 5 to remove and 6  not upgraded.
Need to get 23.7MB of archives. After unpacking 18.1MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.


Maybe there's a config or command-line option to make dselect be more
verbose, but I don't know it.

APT wants to upgrade 43, remove 0 and leave 11 alone, but dselect
wants to upgrade 46, remove 5 and leave 6 alone.

The preferred method of tracking testing/unstable these days is to
use "pinning" (in /etc/apt/preferences), and I understand that dselect
is the better package management tool to use with pinning.

But this is kind of a moot point now, since I found out that my
original problem was caused by the shifting of Gnome2 into Testing.

Still, thank you for your input.

A.